Bigelow claims that “U.S. drone attacks have killed at least 2,600 people in five countries, including as many as 247 children” since 2001. He also charges that the Iraq War began in 2003 with “shock and awe” – which is a lot like fireworks, sort of – and has created “seemingly endless internecine fighting.”

For Bigelow, it somehow follows, in the very same paragraph even, that “[t]he pretend war of celebratory fireworks thus becomes part of a propaganda campaign that inures us – especially the children among us – to current and future wars half a world away.”

While stopping short of telling a bunch of damn kids to get off his lawn, the obscure Portland, Ore. teacher further bellyaches that fireworks create too much noise, cause injuries, start fires and can even lead to lung inflammation.

Bigelow then gets to the real reason for his rant, which is to criticize American middle-school and high-school history and social studies curricula for not being sufficiently leftist or revisionist.

Zinn, who died in 2010, called himself an enthusiast of “democratic socialism.”

His best-selling book is a sloppy, embarrassingly shallow, biased hack job which sees virtually every political issue through the myopic lens of class conflict.

Bigelow criticizes Thomas Jefferson by suggesting that he stole his idea for the Declaration of Independence and was but a pawn amid the forces of “nationwide political upheaval.”

He criticizes George Washington for giving “the orders of a war criminal” concerning the “genocidal Sullivan campaign, one of the largest military offensives of the war, which burned Iroquois villages and destroyed every orchard and farm in its path to deny food to Indians.”

As EAGnews.org notes, fireworks celebrations of all shapes and sizes have been an American tradition since the day before this magnificent country even existed. In a letter dated July 3, 1776, John Adams declared to his wife, Abigail Adams, that the founding “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”